Lucid Dreaming: The Bonkers World Inside Our Minds

Some people can control their dreams. While they're fast asleep: they fly, create new worlds, live other lives. But Wendy isn't one of them. So in today's episode, Wendy and the Science Vs team find a scientifically approved method to try to lucid dream. We test it out — and bizarre things start happening. We also explore how scientists are trying to harness the strange powers of lucid dreaming to help people, as well as to crack huge scientific mysteries, like: What is consciousness? And what exactly goes on in all of our heads when we're asleep? To do all this and more, we talk to psychologists Dr. Denholm Adventure-Heart and Dr. Brigitte Holzinger, as well as cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Başak Türker. Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsLucidDreaming In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Let's Fly! (04:24) Does Reality Testing Work? (11:30) Does the MILD Technique work? (14:10) Wendy and the Team Try to Lucid Dream (17:37) Can Drugs or Masks Help You Lucid Dream? (19:28) Inside the Mind of a Lucid Dreamer (26:24) Strange Windows of Consciousness (27:58) The Lucid Dreaming Brain (34:53) Can We Use Lucid Dreaming to Help Us? (38:32) Did the Science Vs team have a Lucid Dream? This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman, with help from Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang, Joel Werner, Meryl Horn and Ekedi Fauster-Keeys. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Sam Bair. Music written by Bobby Lord, Bumi Hidaka, So Wiley, Peter Leonard and Emma Munger. Thanks to all the researchers we spoke to including Dr Karen Konkoly, Dr Benjamin Baird, and Professor Ken Paller. Also thanks to the Zukerman Family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Whoa, this is incredible. And I like flew around in like big loop-de-loos. I'm up high, I'm looking down at the trees, I'm feeling the wind in my hair and just totally going for it.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  I felt like I'd unlocked something like super magical. Then I really did have the sensation, I was like, this feels to me like what it would feel like to be flying in the sky.

• 0:30Wendy Zukerman?

  Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman and you're listening to Science Versus. Today on the show, we're pitting facts against flying as we swoop into the world of lucid dreaming. There are people that have a superpower where they know that they're dreaming and sometimes can even control what happens next. And in their dreams, people all over the world are saying,

• 0:54Speaker 02

  Okay, great, let's fly.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  And that's what I did. I was just flying up and down the staircase.

• 1:04Speaker 03

  I found myself flying through a beautiful landscape, I guess similar to New Zealand.

• 1:13Wendy Zukerman?

  And the insanely almost magical thing about lucid dreaming is that people who do this will tell you that it feels real. It's not like closing your eyes and imagining that you're flying or doing whatever. You're really there.

• 1:27Speaker 04

  It feels so real, you're like, how is this possible? It feels so real. And like you can hear, you can smell, you can even taste. You know, I've had lucid dreams where I've just gone to a banquet and just tried all the different foods on the table. I could also have superpowers and go on epic missions into outer space. And it was just this like playground in your own mind.

• 1:46Wendy Zukerman?

  A playground to be whoever you want to be. And for some folks, this isn't just a bit of fun. They're also trying to use lucid dreaming to improve their mental health, overcome fears, and to understand themselves better. That's how my friend Archer used lucid dreaming. He's the guy going, Ooh, flying down the staircase. Archer is a trans man. He wasn't born with a penis. And for years now, he wished that he had one.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  So in a lucid dream, I decided to summons a penis. And then the penis appeared. I made one in a dream.

• 2:32Wendy Zukerman?

  How did it feel?

• 2:34Speaker 02

  A bit underwhelming. So I tried it out in a dream. I used it in a sexy way and it was like, this is fine. But it wasn't amazing. You know, not this great thing that I needed to complete my body. And then I would be happy, healthy guy out in the world.

• 2:55Wendy Zukerman?

  How big was, how big was this for you?

• 2:57Speaker 02

  How big was?

• 3:00Wendy Zukerman?

  Um. How big was the moment, Arch?

• 3:07Speaker 02

  That was one part of a healing process for me. And now I'm in a place where, actually, now I don't really want a penis anymore. That's just for me. Obviously, it's really important for some people.

• 3:20Wendy Zukerman?

  Have you since practised lucid dreaming for any other kind of sexy dreams?

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I'm only human.

• 3:28Wendy Zukerman?

  This is a magical power you have.

• 3:33Wendy Zukerman?

  So today on the show, we are going to teach you how to lucid dream. That's right, scientists have studied the best way to get this superpower. And we will reveal their peer reviewed secrets. We'll also explore how researchers are trying to harness the strange powers of lucid dreaming to help people through trauma and depression and to crack these huge scientific mysteries. Like, what is consciousness? And what exactly goes on in all of our heads when we're asleep? When it comes to lucid dreaming, there's a lot of.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  Let's fly.

• 4:08Wendy Zukerman?

  And then there's science.

• 4:12Wendy Zukerman?

  Science versus lucid dreaming is coming up just after the break.

• 4:23Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 4:58Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome back. Today, we are flying into the dream world, or at least we're trying to. And if we want to channel lucid dreaming to improve our lives, the first step is to learn how to do this. Because for many of us, it doesn't come easy.

• 5:17Wendy Zukerman?

  I mean, studies find that around half of us will have had at least one lucid dream in our lifetime. But not all lucid dreams are created equal. For me, the best I've gotten is that I'll realise I'm dreaming for a moment and then I either wake up or go back to regular sleep. And my lackluster lucid experience is pretty common. One study reckoned that only around a third of people who lucid dream can manipulate what they're doing in their dreams. So how can we up our game and learn how to become gods in the dream world?

• 5:56Wendy Zukerman?

  For this, we need Dr. Denham Adventureheart, a psychologist in Brisbane, Australia. Denham lives with sciatica, which can cause this nasty pain throughout his body. And several years ago, things got really bad.

• 6:10Speaker 04

  When it was at its worst, it was so limiting that it was, you know, it was very difficult and painful to even take the bins out at night.

• 6:17Wendy Zukerman?

  There were some days when he could barely get out of bed. Well, unless he was lucid dreaming.

• 6:27Wendy Zukerman?

  Every now and then Denham would find himself in a lucid dream. And there, he could escape his illness.

• 6:34Speaker 04

  I could do anything. You know, I could, not only could I get up and run and, you know, explore and go to new worlds and whatever my imagination could conjure. It actually really helped my quality of life because it gave me something to be excited about.

• 6:48Wendy Zukerman?

  The problem was that Denham couldn't play in this playground very often. He'd go to sleep and night after night, no running, no new worlds. And he'd wake up still stuck in bed, in pain. So Denham decides that he's going to train himself to get better at lucid dreaming. And he gets really into this thing called reality testing or reality checks. And these are huge in the lucid dreaming world. I mean, just ask Christopher Nolan about it. It was an inception. So to understand how this could work, it's helpful to know that often people will spontaneously have a lucid dream because they'll be stuck in the middle of a dream and something really weird will happen

• 7:32Wendy Zukerman?

  that makes them think, what, this has to be a dream? And voila, they're lucid. And so reality testing is all about trying to hack that process. So here's what Denham would do. While he was awake, he'd close his mouth tightly and then try to inhale through his mouth. Wait, I want to try it. So you've got your mouth closed?

• 7:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, and then try to inhale, yeah, with your lips closed. And it doesn't work, right?

• 8:02Wendy Zukerman?

  If you think you're doing this, you're actually breathing through your nose. So the fact that you can't do it tells you that this is not a dream. You are awake and listening to this podcast. But Denham had read that in dreams, you can breathe through a closed mouth. And that was true for him.

• 8:23Speaker 04

  It almost always will feel different. You can feel this sense of closed lips, but at the same time, you can feel the air just entering your lungs and breathing in through your mouth at the same time. Really? Yeah, it's really bizarre.

• 8:39Wendy Zukerman?

  Another super popular reality test is trying to poke your finger straight through your palm. Obviously, while you're awake, it doesn't work. But in the dream world, people say that your finger does go through your palm. And so the idea here is that you will do these reality checks tons of times throughout the day. And because most dreams are reflections of the stuff that we're doing throughout our day, you hope that then, in a dream, you will also do a reality test. And when you feel that air moving through your closed mouth, or you see your finger slip through your palm, then you'll realise, this is a dream. And you'll be lucid.

• 9:25Speaker 04

  And so it's almost like trying to prime yourself to accidentally discover that you're dreaming. You realise, ah, I'm in a dream. That's the moment of lucidity.

• 9:33Wendy Zukerman?

  So Denham is sick at home, and he's doing these reality tests a lot.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  Oh geez, I went pretty overboard with it. I probably was doing it hundreds of times a day at some of those periods.

• 9:47Wendy Zukerman?

  But it was strange because he wasn't having that many lucid dreams. And so was it frustrating?

• 9:55Speaker 04

  Super frustrating. I want, I know how amazing these experiences are, and I know that I can access them, but they're just not coming as often as I would like. So it was incredibly frustrating.

• 10:06Wendy Zukerman?

  So Denham starts thinking, what's going on here? Is it just me? And being a scientist, he decides to study it.

• 10:15Wendy Zukerman?

  He sets up an experiment recruiting more than 350 people from all around the world, making this the largest study I could find on inducing lucid dreams. To get a baseline for seven days, everyone would record how many dreams they were having and how many of those were lucid. Then Denham puts everyone into different groups. Some are told to practise reality testing. They do it for seven days. And guess what?

• 10:41Speaker 04

  Reality testing didn't seem to really make that much of a difference.

• 10:45Wendy Zukerman?

  That's very interesting because even then, I have spoken to quite a lot of lucid dreaming academics and asked them all, how should I do this? And they've all said, you should try reality testing. Like, it's so embedded in the zeitgeist around lucid dreaming. And yet, your study found it actually didn't work.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  Oh, it was very surprising because, like you said, this is like the common wisdom is do reality testing, like, and the more, the better. And it's not even like doing it 100 times is better than 10. It just, it didn't actually seem to matter that much. And so it kind of goes against the grain of what most people will tell you.

• 11:27Wendy Zukerman?

  Other, smaller studies have found this too. On average, we can't see a statistical link between reality testing and having a lucid dream. And one reason for this could be because reality tests can fail in that even in your dream, you still can't put your finger through your palm, which makes perfect sense. We know that dreams are super subjective, unlike what you might read on a lucid dreaming Reddit post. There's no physics or biology in the dream world that means your hands are made of putty. But in Denham's study, he was testing other lucid dreaming techniques as well. And he did find something that worked.

• 12:10Wendy Zukerman?

  It's called mnemonic induction of lucid dreams. And in Denham's study, on average, about one in six times that people tried this method, they had a lucid dream. One in six. Wow, that's a pretty good rate.

• 12:26Speaker 04

  It's a very good rate.

• 12:28Wendy Zukerman?

  Here's what you've got to do. You set your alarm clock.

• 12:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it goes off at about five hours after you've gone to sleep.

• 12:35Wendy Zukerman?

  That's, that's rubbish, five hours.

• 12:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, look, it's a bit of a necessary evil, unfortunately.

• 12:44Wendy Zukerman?

  You're waking up at around four or 5 a.m. because you're trying to catch yourself in REM sleep, which is where most of us have our lucid dreams. Okay, so once you wake up.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  Imagine yourself being back in a dream, ideally the one you were just in. Imagine yourself walking around noticing something like a pink elephant or something strange.

• 13:07Wendy Zukerman?

  So you're trying to remember the dream that you were just in. You're visualizing yourself being back there. And what you're doing is trying to notice something unusual that might make you realize, hey, I'm dreaming. And as you're awake, repeat this mantra. Next time I'm dreaming, I want to remember that I'm dreaming.

• 13:30Speaker 04

  You keep doing it until you really are feeling into that intention that next time I'm dreaming, I want to remember that I'm dreaming. Like that, that strength of intention's got to be strong. Once that's set, then you just go back to sleep as normal.

• 13:42Wendy Zukerman?

  In Denham study, people were roughly three times more likely to have a lucid dream after doing this, compared to that week where they weren't doing anything special. And other studies have found that this technique works as well. As a little tip, if you can go back to sleep quickly, within five minutes after doing all the mantra stuff, you up your chance of having a lucid dream even more. Plus, the people in Denham study who had never really tried lucid dreaming before had a similar success rate to those who were more experienced.

• 14:16Speaker 04

  So it shows that even beginners can learn this quite quickly.

• 14:19Wendy Zukerman?

  Do you think that everyone can have a lucid dream? Like if they really put their mind to it, do you think we're all capable of this?

• 14:28Speaker 04

  I don't, I don't know for sure. But if I had to hazard a guess, I would say there probably are some people that could spend a lot of time on this and still not be able to lucid dream. But I would say for most people, it's a learnable skill.

• 14:40Wendy Zukerman?

  A learnable skill, you say?

• 14:43Speaker 00

  Next time I'm dreaming, I will remember I'm dreaming. Next time I'm dreaming, I will remember I'm dreaming.

• 14:50Speaker 06

  Remember I'm dreaming.

• 14:52Wendy Zukerman?

  Next time I'm dreaming.

• 14:54Speaker 06

  I will remember I'm dreaming.

• 14:57Wendy Zukerman?

  I'm dreaming. In Denham's research, people who were far from lucid dreaming ninjas could learn this in just one week. So my editor, Blythe Terrell, senior producer, Rose Rimler, and I, we wanted to fly. Actually, for Rose, she had a very particular dream that she wanted to conjure up.

• 15:17Speaker 06

  You know what? Sometimes to relax, I imagine that I've become very, very small and I'm like the height of a blade of grass and I get to walk around and sit on a mushroom like a toadstool and use a dandelion as an umbrella and that kind of thing. So it'd be kind of fun if I could do that in my, in my dream and then be really vivid and it would be more real than just my awake imagination.

• 15:40Wendy Zukerman?

  Wow, that's so cute, Rose. So I explained how we were gonna do this, that we'd wake up five hours after going to sleep. We would try to remember the dream we were just in. We'd think about all the weird stuff that obviously makes it a dream. And then we'd say the mantra. It should take five to 10 minutes.

• 16:00Speaker 00

  Five to 10, at four in the morning or whatever?

• 16:02Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  Man, you guys have your work cut out for you. I'm glad I can already do this.

• 16:05Speaker 06

  So you are just sort of bragged. Confirmed.

• 16:09Wendy Zukerman?

  Astute ears listening to this podcast might notice that Blythe was one of the voices you heard at the start of the show. She was flying in a lucid dream doing those big loop-de-loops. But Blythe can't do this very often, so she wants to see if she can supercharge her superpower. And Rose and I are gonna find out if we can control things in our dreams for the very first time.

• 16:33Speaker 06

  I'm excited. I'm pumped.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  How are you feeling, Wendy?

• 16:36Wendy Zukerman?

  Uh, I am not optimistic at all, in fact. For me, for me. But no, but I wish I, but I'm really trying to have a positive attitude. All right, meet back in a week. Give ourselves a week.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  Okay, this is day one of the lucid dreaming experiment. Okay, I just woke up. Um, I don't remember all my dream.

• 17:05Speaker 05

  Is, was, okay. But, so I'll try to remember a different dream. I like can't remember any dreams.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  Um, I actually woke up during a dream where I was covered in ticks, like making these huge abscesses on my legs. It's really gross.

• 17:28Speaker 05

  Okay, the next time I dream,

• 17:32Speaker 05

  I will remember I'm dreaming.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  Did try, did the mantra, but no outcome.

• 17:39Speaker 06

  Well, spoiler alert, it didn't work. I did not lose the dream.

• 17:43Speaker 07

  Um, day, whatever. It didn't work. It didn't work.

• 17:47Speaker 06

  Another flop today. Yeah, I don't know. It sucks. It's not for me.

• 17:56Wendy Zukerman?

  So it's not going great, but I'm not giving up. I'm too curious. I want to know what it feels like to walk around inside my own mind. And soon I start looking around online for things to help me. There's this drug that people talk about called galantamine. It sounds like something out of Lord of the Rings, but we think it keeps you in REM for longer than normal. And research has actually found that it can up your chance of having a lucid dream. But it's only really been studied by getting people to take the drug when they wake up at stupid o'clock anyway, while they're doing the technique that we're already doing.

• 18:38Wendy Zukerman?

  Plus, the drug has some side effects, so forget it. There are also masks that you can get for sometimes thousands of dollars, claiming that their lights or sounds can help you, quote, "unlock the world of lucidity, where everything is possible," end quote. And the idea behind some of these masks is actually really interesting because there is research that shows that if you, for example, play someone a particular sound, like three beeps, while they're awake and doing a set of instructions about becoming lucid when they're dreaming, and then you play that same sound when they're asleep, it could cue you to become lucid in that moment.

• 19:24Wendy Zukerman?

  But when it comes to these masks that you can buy online, very few have actually been tested or shown to work.

• 19:33Wendy Zukerman?

  After the break, we go deep inside the brain to find out how people can control things in their dreams.

• 19:54Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 20:29Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome back. Today on the show, lucid dreaming. And now let's find out what is happening in our brains as we go on these grand adventures and have a lucid dream.

• 20:43Wendy Zukerman?

  So if you want to know what's going on in someone's brain as they're lucid, you first have to know the moment that that person who is fast asleep has become lucid. But they're asleep, right? They can't tell you. Well, decades ago, researchers worked out a kind of bonkers way to do this. And I talked about it with Dr. Bishnath Turkar, a cognitive neuroscientist at Parasite University. So she told me that lucid dreamers will come into a lab.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  Tell them to sleep. And if they are having a dream that they're aware of, that a lucid dream, they can send a signal.

• 21:27Wendy Zukerman?

  And the bat signal that researchers chose is that the lucid dreamers would move their eyes all the way to the left and then all the way to the right. And they do that a couple of times. And all the while, they'd have sensors on their face and head to detect eye muscle movements and to make sure that they were sleeping.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  And with this,

• 21:47Speaker 07

  Idea, which is for me, it's incredible. They actually managed to show that sleeping people were actually sending the eye signals to tell I'm having a lucid dream.

• 21:57Wendy Zukerman?

  With this bat signal, scientists can now probe what's going on in someone's brain while they're lucid. Which brings us to the story of Bashak and a lucid dreamer who we'll call A.C. A.C. has narcolepsy, which is a sleep disorder where you fall asleep randomly throughout the day. And for reasons we don't fully understand, it's linked with lucid dreaming.

• 22:23Speaker 07

  So this illness comes with a superpower. You also become a great lucid dreamer. So he was having a lot of lucid dreams and he would tell us about his adventures in the night. I basically spend like one or two hours of my day lucid dreaming.

• 22:38Wendy Zukerman?

  This is A.C.

• 22:40Speaker 07

  So for me, it's like having a second life. So and I don't usually talk about it because nobody wants to hear about it.

• 22:48Wendy Zukerman?

  Because no one wants to hear about your dream. A.C. had been involved in some lucid dreaming experiments where he had to do the bat signal to indicate he was lucid. But he wanted to boldly take lucid dreaming science where no one had gone before. And Bashak and her colleague were intrigued.

• 23:11Speaker 07

  So we thought, OK, that's great. So we can maybe do a little experiment on you. It was in the afternoon. There was a room three and there was like, OK, let's try something.

• 23:21Wendy Zukerman?

  The plan was simple. Bashak and her colleague would ask him yes, no questions while he was fast asleep, but lucid, and he would try to answer them, smiling three times for yes and frowning three times for no. And this is something that for years, science had thought was kind of impossible. I mean, sometimes you might ask a partner in the middle of the night, hey, did you take the trash out? And they kind of respond.

• 23:50Speaker 07

  So they answer and they mumble usually, they're like, and sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it doesn't. We call them micro-arousals. So your brain kind of wakes up for a second.

• 24:02Wendy Zukerman?

  So if you look at their brain activity, you can see that they're not asleep in that moment. You might have woken them up.

• 24:10Wendy Zukerman?

  We also know that in some of the earlier stages of sleep, you are aware of the awake world. But once you are conked out, dead to the world, in deep sleep or REM, you're not supposed to answer questions. So, Basak and her colleague put sensors all around AC's head and face to measure whether he's asleep and what his mouth muscles are doing. Basak tells AC, "Nighty night," or whatever scientists say to each other. And AC lays on the lab bed and goes to sleep.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  But I think we were still a bit naive about. We're like, "Yeah, let's try." But we didn't really, like, we were like, "It might work, but it might not work."

• 24:58Wendy Zukerman?

  AC is in deep sleep, and they could clearly see it on the sensors. But in his dream, he was in an epic battle.

• 25:07Speaker 07

  I was fighting goblins with a wolf's sword. Yeah.

• 25:13Wendy Zukerman?

  He becomes lucid and signals to Basak using the bat signal.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  And then we asked him, for example, some questions.

• 25:19Wendy Zukerman?

  And here's where it gets weird. AC remembers hearing those questions from within the dream.

• 25:28Speaker 07

  It's like a voice from above. You know, when you're in the station and there's an announcement, but you don't know where it comes from, just like that.

• 25:38Wendy Zukerman?

  Basak asks, "Do you like chocolate?"

• 25:41Speaker 07

  Uh, "Do you like chocolate?" And so I smiled three times. "Yeah, I like chocolate."

• 25:45Wendy Zukerman?

  And when Basak sees the smile, she's not sure it's real.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  Is he really sleeping? And we were checking the brain activity. He is. It's like, but he's responding, right? And she's like, "Yeah, yeah, he's responding."

• 25:56Wendy Zukerman?

  She asks more questions.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  "Do you watch football? Do you speak Spanish?"

• 26:00Speaker 07

  And actually, I was lucid enough to think about, "Okay, I can say a couple of words, but does that mean that I'm speaking Spanish? No, that... Doesn't make sense. I was, I'm gonna say no. So. And you're fighting goblins at the same time. Yeah, that's quite epic.

• 26:22Wendy Zukerman?

  And while A C is having a fine time, Bishak and her colleague were starting to freak out.

• 26:29Speaker 00

  We were like, do you see what I'm seeing? And she was like, yes. So it was crazy because we were communicating with someone who was dreaming. And we were alone in this room and super excited. And you know, like half yelling with excitement and half shocked. I think it was one of the scientifically, the best moments of my life, I would say, when I saw that. No, I felt like we discovered a new element, you know, it felt so like we were so, I think. I smiled for a week, nonstop. I was so happy.

• 27:02Wendy Zukerman?

  And as Bishak is smiling about this discovery in France, other researchers in the U S, Germany and the Netherlands are having similar experiences. In one lab, researchers even asked a lucid dreamer, what's eight minus six? And while he was asleep and lucid, he responded using the bat signal to indicate two. After Bishak saw this, she studied it in more lucid dreamers, who, by the way, all had narcolepsy. And she switched up the experiment a little bit. So this time, while they were asleep, they'd hear all of these fake words like ditza. And then real words like pizza. And they had to smile three times for a real word and frown three times for a fake word.

• 27:47Wendy Zukerman?

  Now, sometimes they didn't respond at all, but a bunch of times they did and they answered correctly.

• 27:55Wendy Zukerman?

  But then Bishak noticed something weird. At times, they would answer the question accurately, smile or frown.

• 28:06Wendy Zukerman?

  While they weren't having a lucid dream.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  So we got a bit curious, confused and excited at the same time.

• 28:14Wendy Zukerman?

  So then she recruits 22 folks who couldn't lucid dream and also didn't have narcolepsy. And she repeats the experiment.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  It's crazy, but they were also able to do the task. So they were indeed asleep according to their brain activity. But they were able to respond.

• 28:31Wendy Zukerman?

  Wait, they could. So we could all. So if I went to sleep now and you started asking me, what's a word? Pizza or pizza? Chances are I would respond. It's like.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  There are chances. It's not all the time, but it looks like there are some transient windows of opening, let's say, in which participants respond and then they stop responding.

• 28:50Wendy Zukerman?

  But the thing is, the lucid dreamers were answering the questions a lot more often.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  Yes. So if you are lucid dreaming, you tend to respond way more.

• 29:01Wendy Zukerman?

  So this tells us that even when people aren't lucid dreaming, there are these small windows where parts of our brain can listen to the outside world around us and can even figure out whether a word is real or made up, which upends what many of us had thought about what was going on while we were sleeping. But there was something particularly special about what was going on in the brain of someone who was having a lucid dream. And that meant that those windows where they could respond to the awake world, they were open more often. And in Bhushak's study, she saw an important clue as to why this might be.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  When you're lucid, in our study, what we see is that your brain activity is more complex, more rich and more rapid compared to when they were not lucid.

• 29:50Wendy Zukerman?

  But not so rich that they woke up.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  Exactly. It's like rich, but not so rich.

• 29:56Wendy Zukerman?

  Other research is helping us to explain how we can even have a lucid dream in the first place. We think a brain area called the prefrontal cortex is important. So normally, when you're dreaming and not lucid, the activity in this part of the brain winds down, which Bhushak says might explain why weird things can happen in your dream, and that's fine.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  In a dream, you might have your mom that transforms to a cat, and you wouldn't be shocked. You'll be like, "Oh yeah, my mom's a cat now. It's okay." It's because probably your frontal cortex is a bit deactivated, so you cannot, you don't get shocked by this.

• 30:35Wendy Zukerman?

  But, we think, based on limited evidence, that while people are lucidly dreaming, this critical area of your brain is more awake.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  Which allows you to detect anomalies in your dream and be like, "Oh, this is a dream because this doesn't make sense. This wouldn't happen in everyday life."

• 30:56Wendy Zukerman?

  And because lucid dreaming is this hybrid state of consciousness, you know, between being asleep and awake, researchers like Bhushak now want to use lucid dreaming to help us understand what consciousness is at all, which remains, according to one review, quote, "one of the largest lacunas in scientific knowledge." And to save you the time, I Googled it, and lacuna means "unfilled space." And just quickly, some lucid dreams can actually be felt throughout your whole body. Like, if you ask lucid dreamers to hold their breath in a dream,

• 31:38Wendy Zukerman?

  you can see that air stops flowing through your nose and your blood oxygen levels drop, just slightly. In another study, someone had an orgasm in their lucid dream, and researchers could measure more blood flowing to her vagina.

• 31:55Wendy Zukerman?

  So, how close are we at Science Versus to having what she's having? A week has gone by, and by now, have we unlocked this hybrid state of consciousness? Everyone say yay if you've had a lucid dream. One, two, three.

• 32:19Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 32:19Wendy Zukerman?

  Hmm, no luck, no luck.

• 32:22Speaker 06

  Nope.

• 32:23Wendy Zukerman?

  Blythe, you actually have this superpower. Has this supercharged your superpower?

• 32:31Speaker 06

  Zero percent supercharged. Like, I feel like it is actively draining my will to live.

• 32:38Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, no. What's going on?

• 32:40Speaker 06

  If I wake up in the middle of the night, it is very, very hard for me to go back to sleep. I feel like my brain, once it's awake, it's like, ooh, I'm awake. Would you like to think about 10,000 problems? Or like four weird things you said yesterday? Maybe five? We could keep going. Inside my head, I am just like.

• 33:00Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, no.

• 33:01Speaker 06

  I was like, I actually do not think this is probably worth it for me. Wendy, how have you? How's it been going for you?

• 33:06Wendy Zukerman?

  Something strange happened. So let me tell you. I woke up and had been in the middle of a, of this dream where me and my, where there was this sort of creepy oval. I'll just jump in and spare you the pain of listening to too many of my dreams. So basically, what happened is that I woke up from this dream where a bunch of bonkers stuff is going on. I was getting attacked by bats. And just as denim study suggested, I tried to think of all of the wacky things that clearly made this a dream. But in that moment, in the middle of the night, I couldn't think of any reason why it was obviously a dream. And then I went back to sleep.

• 33:51Wendy Zukerman?

  The next night, another dream. This time, I'm in a tunnel on the beach about to drown. And I've got my laptop. I wake up and, well, as I told Blythe and Rose. And the same thing happens. What about this was clearly a dream? And I'm like, well, there could be a tunnel. I could, I could have brought my laptop to the beach. And the second time it happened, I realized maybe I was sleeping the whole time. What do you mean?

• 34:21Speaker 06

  Like, you think you're trying to lucid dream?

• 34:23Wendy Zukerman?

  Dream as part of your dream, like in your dream. Yes. What? I think maybe both times I didn't actually wake up.

• 34:33Wendy Zukerman?

  You just dreamt that you woke up? Ah. And you dreamt that you tried to lucid dream? Well, does it still matter? If I was asleep the whole time, this is known as a false awakening. And curiously, academics have actually written about this phenomenon where your dreams try to convince you that they're actually not dreams. A C says for him, this happens all the time. It's the people in his lucid dreams who tell him, this is not a dream. Like, what the [bleep]? This is ridiculous. And I don't understand why the dream tries so hard to convince me that it's reality. And Denim and Bashak told me that when you think about the neuroscience of lucid dreaming,

• 35:18Wendy Zukerman?

  in a weird way, this kind of makes sense.

• 35:22Speaker 04

  The state of the brain is firing in when you're in a lucid dream. It's like a tight rope walk between normal waking consciousness and normal, non-lucid dreaming. But that's a difficult state for the brain to maintain. It almost like wants to tend towards either just waking up or falling into non-lucidity.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  So maybe it's a way your brain to get back to this, you know, its natural state. But yeah, I don't know. That's very insane that your dream characters would tell you this is life.

• 35:53Wendy Zukerman?

  I know. Exactly. It's completely insane. Okay, our next question. Can we use lucid dreaming to help us in our lives, to be happier people?

• 36:06Wendy Zukerman?

  Well, in one survey, many folks said that having a lucid dream helped them when they were feeling depressed or low. One person said that after a lucid dream, they could have this happy and beautiful experience that would stay with them for days. Another said, quote, "It can kickstart your day and keep you warm." And a small study found that the day after people had lucid dreams, on average, they felt less stressed. But be warned, if you're waking yourself up in the middle of the night to try lucid dreaming, we know that messing with your sleep can be bad for your mental health. Just remember, Bligh. Inside my head, I am just like.

• 36:49Wendy Zukerman?

  And curiously, some researchers actually found a link between being depressed and having more lucid dreams. We're not sure why. And just quickly, the last thing we want to look into is whether lucid dreaming can help people who have horrendous nightmares, which, if this happens to you regularly, it can be awful, making you anxious, having difficulty sleeping. And so there's been this idea for a while now that if you can have a lucid dream.

• 37:19Speaker 03

  It's like, of course, yeah, with a lucid dream, if you have a nightmare, you can do things, change it or transform it.

• 37:28Wendy Zukerman?

  Brigitta Holsinger is a psychologist at the Medical University of Vienna, and she has studied this herself. She's recruited people who were having terrible nightmares about being assaulted, run over by a train, hunted by a monster. She'd teach them how to lucid dream, and she told me that it really did help some of her patients.

• 37:50Speaker 03

  Some woke themselves up, others would turn around and face the monster.

• 37:55Wendy Zukerman?

  There was one person who used to have these really frightening dreams of being chased where they had to escape. But after learning to lucid dream, they told Gita.

• 38:05Speaker 03

  Now that I know that I'm dreaming, I would be stupid if I would stop this or change it. It's much better than every James Bond movie I've ever seen.

• 38:14Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, wow. Now they could have fun with it, now that there's true realisation, it's just a dream.

• 38:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was all very impressive and wonderful.

• 38:25Wendy Zukerman?

  But unfortunately, the evidence that lucid dreaming can help loads of people conquer their nightmares, it isn't so impressive and wonderful. We now have several rather small studies, including Gita's, and there's a new one that's been making headlines, that show that after getting people to try lucid dreaming, they do report fewer nightmares. But these studies combine lucid dreaming with intensive therapy, and it's really hard to tease out what's doing the heavy lifting here. Plus, surveys find that even when people become lucid in their nightmares, they often can't change what's happening. So they'll be stuck in this terrifying dream.

• 39:10Wendy Zukerman?

  And just knowing, this is a dream, it's not real. That isn't necessarily that helpful. In fact, in a survey, including more than 30 US veterans with PTSD who could lucid dream, only three said that they felt relieved to know that they'd been dreaming. Many just felt anxious about it. So even this superpower has its kryptonite, its limitations. But despite that, just like Superman, I still wanted to fly. I switched up the lucid dreaming method a little bit, just so I could sleep better, but kept trying. And still, the closest I'd gotten is realising that I'm in a dream,

• 39:55Wendy Zukerman?

  but then getting too excited and waking up before I could do anything. I talked to Gator about it, who gave me one final piece of advice.

• 40:05Speaker 03

  Almost everybody experiences that, you get so exhilarated, oh my God, this is now happening, boom, and you get up, you wake up.

• 40:12Wendy Zukerman?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 40:14Speaker 03

  Yes, I know, of course, I had those as well. To me, it is like learning how to skate. Yeah, you have to get your balance. Eventually, you will be able to keep that balance and ride that wave. Just be patient and persistent.

• 40:34Wendy Zukerman?

  All right, all right.

• 40:36Speaker 03

  But it'll happen if you keep doing it.

• 40:43Wendy Zukerman?

  Blith, Rose, it's the end of the episode. Everyone say yay if you had a lucid dream.

• 40:55Wendy Zukerman?

  One, two, three.

• 41:01Wendy Zukerman?

  Yay!

• 41:03Wendy Zukerman?

  Really? Wow, it worked. You did? I had one! Oh my God, Wendy, what? I know, I did it, I did it! Oh my God. Do you want to hear the voice message I made straight after? Yeah. Yeah.

• 41:20Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh my gosh, I just had a lucid dream. I just did it, I just did it, I just did it.

• 41:25Speaker 07

  Having a nap and I just went to sleep. And in the dream, I was lying on my bed. And my entire ponytail came off. And I was looking at it going, ooh. Then I was like, no, wait, this is a dream. Ponytails don't just pop off. This is a dream, this is a dream, this is a dream. And then I put the ponytail down on the bed. And I just felt it like how everyone says you just feel. Cause feel things feel so real. And it did, and it did, and it did. And it felt, it felt like my hair.

• 42:06Speaker 07

  It felt like my hair, all the little strands, all the little, the little bits of hair. It felt, it felt like that, it felt like that. I did it. Oh. How did you feel when you woke up? It felt awesome. It felt awesome. I do love that, that the lopped off ponytail was enough of the like unreality dream world, you know, like it was the, the chopped off ponytail was like weird enough.

• 42:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, not taking your laptop into a cave at the beach. That was par for the course. But a haircut? That would never happen.

• 42:49Wendy Zukerman?

  That's science passes.

• 42:56Wendy Zukerman?

  This episode has 99 citations. So if you want to read more about the science of lucid dreaming, then you just need to go to our show notes and click on our transcript. And there's a link and you'll see all that wonderful science there awaiting you. If you want to tell us about your lucid dreaming experiences, I would love to hear it. You can find us on Instagram. We're at science underscore BS and I'm on Tik Tok at Wendy Zukerman.

• 43:33Wendy Zukerman?

  This episode has been produced by me, Wendy Zukerman, with help from Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang, Merrill Horn, Joel Werner, and Akedi Foster-Kees. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Sam Behr. Music written by Bobby Lord, Bumi Hidaka, So Wiley, Peter Leonard, and Emma Munger. Thanks to all of the researchers that we spoke to for this episode, including Dr. Karen Konkoly, Dr. Benjamin Baird, and Professor Ken Pala. Also, a big thanks to the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle-Wilson. Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original. Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you aren't listening on Spotify, then follow us

• 44:15Wendy Zukerman?

  and tap the bell icon so you'll get notifications when new episodes come out. And if you like the show, please give us a five-star review. It really helps people find the show. I'm Wendy Zukerman. Back to you next time.